A video (here and here) has recently emerged online which claims to show Indian National Congress leader K Muraleedharan campaigning in Thrissur with Pakistani flags. This claim suggests that no Indian flags were seen during this campaign. We will fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Indian National Congress leader K Muraleedharan campaigned in Thrissur with Pakistani Flags.
Fact: The flags visible in the viral video are actually the flags of Indian Union Muslim League, a political party and not the Pakistani flag. The video was originally from 2019, not a recent one. Thus, the claim made in the post is rated False.
Our first point of interest was the watermark on the viral video, which, translated from Malayalam, reads “Kondotty Pachapada”. A keyword search led us to the same video on the Facebook page of “Kondotty Pachapada,” a political organisation according to its page bio. The video was originally posted on 19 April 2019.
The caption on the Facebook post explains that the video records a campaign of K Muraleedharan in Vadakara, Kerala, where he contested for the Lok Sabha in 2019 and won.
Also, a close examination of the flags in the viral video clarifies that the green flags visible are not Pakistani flags. The flag of Pakistan (here, here and here) has a white portion in addition to the green, which is absent in the flags in the video.
These flags represent the Indian Union Muslim League, a political party based in Kerala that is in alliance with the Congress party in Kerala. The difference between the Pakistani flag and the IUML flag can be observed in the graphic below.
In the past, too, we debunked posts that falsely claimed the IUML flag as the Pakistani flag, which you can find here and here.
To sum up, the viral video falsely claims that an Indian National Congress leader was campaigning with Pakistani flags. The flags in the video are actually the flags of Indian Union Muslim League, a Kerala-based political party.
